Province of Carolina

The Province of Carolina was an English and British colony of North America that existed from 1629 to 1712, with Charleston serving as its capital. Robert Heath was granted the Cape Fear region in 1629, but the charter was later ruled invalid; it was not until 24 March 1663 when the eight Lords Proprietors were granted ownership of the new colony. They were granted a charter by King Charles II of England to establish a colony south of the Chesapeake and north of Spanish Florida, and the proprietors enlisted John Locke's assistance in drafting a constitution which provided for religious liberty and political rights for all small property holders while supporting an aristocracy upheld by laborers and slaves. In 1670, the first permanent settlement, Charleston (named for King Charles), was established along the coast. Most of the early settlers were from Barbados, the only seventeenth-century English colony to be settled by people from other colonies. The Barbadian immigrants brought their slaves with them, and slaves made up half of the population by 1700. In the mid-1690s, the colonists began to build rice plantations, and they captured and enslaved thousands of local Native Americans and sold them to Caribbean planters. In 1712, the colony separated into North Carolina and South Carolina.